Art + Hip Hop + Video = M.I.A vs Kanye, Who is the Most Ironic of Them All?

M.I.A's xxxo 

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Kanye West's Power

For an intricate press review about what this is actually about, click here.

p.s. could this be intertwined in the equation? Napoleon leading the Army over the Alps (2005) by Kehinde Wiley (a work presently in the Brooklyn Museum).

Jeff Koons' penis vs. John Baldessari's brain: what does it take for the 'what is art' question to be successfully conveyed?

Curious to compare the National Gallery's Pop Life: Art in a Material World exhibit to the one presented last October in the Tate Modern, I accidently ended up in Ottawa on Canada Day. Both in the UK and in Canada, Pop Life was, and remains, a blockbuster success.

If there are a few differences - particularly in Canada, the sad spacial absence marking the controversy around Richard Prince's photograph of young Brooke Shields' nude and the unnecessary addition of a room thought-out by so-called genius concept Reena Spaulings but based on a notion articulated better by others fifty years ago (see Nouveau Realist Daniel Spoerri in particular) - both exhibits are a shiny clutter of recognizable works, names, ideas, shows, things, accessories and humor by Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol's disciples (Haring, Basquiat, etc) and Andy Warhol's sons (Hirst, Koons, etc).

This success is obviously tied to the overt and cool 'contentious' issues that are embedded in the show's premise: Brillo Boxes (courtesy Warhol) and a calf in formaldehyde (courtesy Hirst) question art with an 'ironic' regard Mona Lisa incontestably can't. However how does this type of art get to be such a success when similar contentious questions have also been tackled by artists without the clunky use of their penis stuck in La Cicciolina waxed asshole (courtesy Koons)?

When I saw Pop Art at the Tate Modern, the neighboring temporary exhibition was a retrospective, John Baldessari Pure Beauty. After the bustling business and literal heat of the Pop Art rooms, John Baldessari's space was strikingly different - it was empty. Better to contemplate his thoughtful yet biting career of videos, words, canvases, collages and a final installation (see photo above) subtly questioning the nature of our contemporary human condition, the difference of public interest between both shows was a sad nod to what Pierre Bourdieu hoped for: the opening up of museums. Indeed in the 60s this French sociologist observed the exclusion of people lacking a cultural capital, and invited museums to democratize their spaces with better formulated labels, programs, visits, relaxed atmospheres, cheaper entrance fees, etc...

Ideally I'm all about this, I think art can be a powerful force to question our own assumptions on reality. Practically, though, exhibitions that are public successes seem to require the straightforward 'irony' and (at this point) boring 'controverse' of Warhol and this results in people like Jeff Koons and Cosey Fanni Tutti imposing their wet dreams to my face in the name of 'irony', 'mockery' and 'art.'

I believe in Baldessari. (the MET is opening his retrospective next October).

Nike Air Max 90 Ad: An analysis of the Shoe Collector's Core Values

After "Write the Future," Wieden and Kennedy launched a new commercial for the Nike Air Max 90 shoe in the UK. Entitled "I am the Rules" this is a one minute film of clean, concise, energized and assured images. If the symmetrical geometry of each frame and beat-based music are powerful factors to this effect, the colours are just as important: the six colours of the exclusively designed for Footlocker shoe are used throughout the ad, with black, grey and white as base, and colza, red and violet as decorative highlights.

If at first the whole thing feels like a mish-mash of rule-breaking attitude, it's unsurprisingly filled with stereotypical ideas (that sell) about tradition, innovation and respect. How are these materialized?

During the first few seconds of the clip we are introduced to the very majestic notion of time and history - somewhat of sports, but also in general with the a shadow clocking away, the iconography of kingdoms lost and of traditions forgotten (aka the projection of the colosseum). Then, skipping through a few centuries, we are facing present-time sport brands' favorite athletes - the consuming shoe collector - commanding the video with his remote control. From then on things get a little crazy, when intercutting slow motion and rapid shots of various activities paralleled with statements about defying tradition (by dancing hip hop or being a girl boxer), expectations (screaming at microphones/media) and stereotypes (wear Nike instead of suits) are presented. The guys who created hip-hip might be 60 by now and blowing up in front of media not so revolutionary (or appreciated by brands like Nike see Tiger Woods or Les Bleus), but these ideas look great. The weirdest thing is when the ad turns to illustrating how to defy prejudice via Nike shoes. They come up with two Brian Jungenian masks, a DIY time machine from Japan with flags waving and lighting fire crackers over an athlete in front of the projection of the amphitheater. 

Really defying your idea of prejudice, right?

"I AM THE RULES"

Timelessness might have begun in 1961 and take the Form of a Giraffe called Sophie

Timelessness is a reassuring concept overused particularly by fashion people to increase sales and/or indulge their own consumption - depending on the season and the year the necessity to own certain time-adapted timeless objects over other time-adapted timeless objects varies (these days the timeless things are Burberry trenches, Chloé bell bottoms, Hermès Kelly bags and Cacharel re-editions of their liberty print collections - and if they aren't timeless right now wait till next season) - yet recently I came across an object that might just be the closest thing to timelessness: Sophie la Girafe.

Yes, it only appeared in 1961, and yes, it was mostly a success in France - which, relative to the dawn of time is short and to the size of the planet small - but even after the slue of inventions in the past half century by the toy industry - that in the US alone makes 21 billion dollars a year, - Sophie remains as perfectly enjoyed in my mother's baby hands as in three-month old baby Eva Madeleine's.

After a Triennal Downtown and Biennale Midtown, a Dynasty in Paris: are young artist getting better or are institutions changing?

I went to the collaborative curatorial exhibition Dynasty by the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d'art Modern in Paris earlier this month.

I was particularly interested in seeing, what feels like, yet another manifestation of an established art institution's lust for showing work by emerging new talents - some of whom, may or may not, be the next biggest thing and some of whom, may or may not, have anything but youth to convince you their presence in these shows is legit.

With the recent Whitney Biennale and the New Museum Triennal as American examples of this fashionable trend, I was wondering how the French version would compare, and, if, in my short review for Corduroy I clearly found the Parisian version of the concept better concocted, with my visit I also started to wonder how 'new' this thirst for young new art really was?

Obviously throughout art history young age never obstructed recognition or hype, and so clearly that isn't what is new here - there are dozens of examples of artists that were recognized, revered and admired before they hit thirty - by 27 (age of his death) Basquiat had amassed quite some fortune and been honored with numerous gallery retrospectives, by the age of 24 Picasso was selling to Leo and Gertrude Stein and throwing fancy diner parties in Montmartre, and by age 29 Michelangelo had a few exploits under his belt including two chef d'oeuvres La Pietá and David (respectively done at 24 and 29) and 4 years working for the at the Medici family (which he left at age 17).

So artists can be artists before they are older than Jesus for sure, yet has something changed in the way our institutions - these large, highly profiled centers - are portraying them? Portrayed more for their emergence and youth, as much as their art and craft? In 1953, the Guggenheim Museum held an exhibition entitled "Younger European Painters" on the then new and exciting expressionist movement, in which many were over 33 - like Pierre Soulages, 34 or William Scott, 40. Unlike Dynasty, though, it seems youth wasn't what brought these painters together but rather the unity of their aesthetic - and in a way accessorily a particularly young one at the time.

A second difference seems to be the role the institutions are starting to embrace. If Basquiat was world-renowned with gallery representation and enamored collectors by his death in 1988, it was only four years later that the first museum - the Whiteny - curated a solo exhibition of his work. Could it be, then, that today our large are institutions partake in and expose a 'selection process' that once was more hidden - with gallerists, critics, a bit of time and artistic self-doubt that led certain artists to become part of a certain canon and others not as much?

My short review on Dynasty: http://www.corduroymag.com/events/a-dynasty-in-paris/

(images: All taken at Dynasty - Upper: in the Musée d'art Modern de la Ville de Paris Imaginez Maintenant by Robin Meier and Ali Momeni; Lower: in the Palais de Tokyo, a work by Julien Dubuisson entitled Visite Exterieure d'une Grotte)

Pretty Birds and Big Guitars: a lovely mediated version of an installation by Boursier-Mougenot

This Céleste Boursier-Mougenot installation was presented some time ago as a commission in the Barbican's The Curve. Although I never experienced the installation - it has now been replaced by John Bock's playful metallic home structures - and maybe the mediated version of it was better than the art it captured anyways, but there's something so subtle, delicate and humorous as well as violent and dark about this video/art piece that it is still worth a look every then and again:

Embroidery classes at l'Atelier Lesage and Jean-Paul Gaultier's hoddie: French material culture and métisses origins

JP Gaultier's fall/winter 2010-11 Prêt-à-Porter collection of embroidered patterns on skirts, hoodies and jackets is up at Colette - a collection the concept store describes as one "dédiée à la France métissée. Afrique, Mongolie, Chine, Mexique, ses influences sont multiples et mixées à son propre style." 

Which doesn't say much - fashion likes to find its origins in concepts by simplifying them - but does demonstrate that this year's crew of interns, while forgetting to include Peruvians to their list of bearers of colourful patterns and being particularly out-of-date with what is multiculturalism, struck up an interesting point, not so much on contemporary French identity, as on contemporary French (and more broadly western) material culture.

I just finished an intensive 18 hour embroidery stage in the last of Paris' embroidering ateliers:  Atelier Lesage - an all female crew of 70 pattern makers, designers and embroiders headed by one man (François Lesage, the owner) who spend hours crocheying and needling beads, threads and precious jewels unto haute-couture creations. The last atelier of a French tradition that now is done in countries with cheaper labour - 101 econ: this is called offshoaring.

Back at Colette, with my newly acquired knowledge of point de Boulogne and point de graine, it was clear that Gaultier's prêt-à porter hadn't, indeed, gone through these brodeuses' hands - with the inside full of small industrial white strings. It's hard to blame JP in today's economic structure (the hoddie's already selling for 1561 bucks), but with the chances of the hoodie coming straight from China - just like it's so-called conceptual roots - it's a perfect artefact of our Western contemporary material culture's base: a métissage of concepts, sure, maybe, but especially a métissage of producers, makers and consumers. And not even a métissage really but more an international chain of production/consumption that goes mostly one way.

I still love it. But that's because I'm French, and as Gaultier has demonstrated the French are all about métissage.

A recent example of an anti-modern twist to LaTour's 'quasi object', or Why does the Hipstamatic iphone application exist?

Compare and Contrast: France from Hondarribia in Spain

I was in the Pays Basque for a couple days and finally discovered the what behind the uploading of 'hipstamatic' images on facebook (which is mostly a French phenomenon). These images are slightly fuzzy and sporadically covered with clearer dots. They are also darker around the frame and their colours are warmer than the reality they capture. Another distinguishable feature is the varying result - so the size of the shadow near the edges is different from one photo to another,- and the beige film paper of a Polaroid that frames all the photographs.

Interestingly it isn't only the aesthetic of the image that recall the photos of the past but also the act itself. So unlike all the recent digital photographing processes, there is a lapse of time between when the photo is taken and when the final photo is visible - a lapse of time or process called 'development' - and a definite unclarity of what you are actually photographing since the frame of the hipstamatic camera is reduced to a few centimeters while the final image captures a much larger reality.

The original Hipstamatic was created in 1982 and was the result of a merge between the Kodak Instamatic and the desire to make a cheap and practical camera by two Americans called Bruce and Winston Dorbowski: "It doesn't matter if the photos aren't prefect -- as long as people are capturing memories I will be happy." And basically the iphone App is quite successfully trying to recapture that imperfect image quality and process.

But why?

In 1993 the French theorist Bruno LaTour articulated the idea of 'quasi-objects' or things that can create multiple times and diffuse conceits of a predictable ontological order. In other words the hipstamatic iphone app is jumble of multiple time periods (both of 2010 and the 1980s) or a combination of anachronistic artifacts. It's a retro aesthetic and a ultra-modern device. And in many ways this can be paralleled to other contemporary lifestyle choices that are often coined anti-modern: "DIY labor, recycling, thrifting, urban gardening, sewing while simultaneously seizing individual control over mystified technologies such as computers, the internet, digital recording, medicine, and even water purification and food production and consumption. This is sustainability with an attitude and an aesthetic" (Lee Dawdy June 20th 2010).